Citizen Journalism

Joi Ito is teaching his Digital Journalism course again at Keio University this summer, but this time with a twist. In addition to the traditional semester, where Joi will be teaching within the university, the course will also have an open and online component where anyone may apply to join via the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). Digital Journalism 2010 will run for seven weeks with seven physical meetings which will be webcast and allow for online participation. Additionally, asynchronous communications will continue between classes on mailing lists, the class blog, wiki, and the P2PU platform.

Digital Journalism 2010 is “an introduction to online journalism, citizen media and the use of social networks for journalism and collective action. Participants will work on self defined projects either as individuals or in groups using any combination of media types including video, photographs, illustrations and text as well as online tools such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and any other reasonable tool the participant or team would like to use.” In addition to learning about how the journalism landscape is rapidly changing, participants will learn to research and create news online by publishing stories of their own in teams. These stories will be presented to the class (and the world).

The course is a work in progress, so the community can contribute by suggesting readings, activities, and more. P2PU is looking for course organizers to facilitate the P2PU end of things. If interested, please contact thepeople [at] p2pu.org. To participate in the course remotely via P2PU, you can sign up to apply at www.p2pu.org/journalism. Sign-up is open now and the course will begin on Friday, 4 June.

The Peer 2 Peer University is “a grassroots education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls.” In addition to leveraging existing OER, P2PU licenses all of its own courses under CC BY-SA. For more on why P2PU chose this license, visit http://p2pu.org/license.

To the Bay Area CC community: we hope you can make it to our next CC Salon SF this Wednesday, from 7-9 pm. The theme is “CC and Citizen Journalism,” and we’re very excited about the presenters we’ve got lined up:

From Wikinews: Volunteer Coordinator Cary Bass and Bay Area “Wikinewsie” volunteer Jon Davis will talk about their experience at Wikinews, a global citizen journalism effort and project of the Wikimedia Foundation.

From Spot.us: David Cohn, who has been involved with myriad citizen journalism projects, the likes of which include NewAssignment.net and his current endeavor, Spot.us – a crowdfunding journalism project of the nonprofit Center for Media Change.